Usually when you purchase a new vehicle, you know you’ll have to buy insurance separately, and — depending on the terms of the sale — pay for maintenance costs somewhere down the proverbial and literal road. Tesla says it’s planning to eventually bundle all of that together for one price. [More]
vertical integration
LensCrafters And Ray-Ban Parent Company To Merge With Lens Maker, Form Eyewear Voltron
By 1.16.17
Luxxotica and Essilor may not be household names, but you may very well have one of their products on your face right now. If you’ve visited LensCrafters or Pearle Vision for your eyeglasses or contacts, or Sunglass Hut for sunglasses, you’ve done business with the Italian eyewear conglomerate Luxxotica, and if you bought Varilux or Transitions lenses during that visit, you’ve done business with the French lens company Essilor. [More]
AT&T CEO: Letting Us Buy Time Warner Will “Disrupt” TV, Be “Good For Consumers”
By 12.7.16
When AT&T announced in October that it would spend $85 billion to acquire Time Warner, the plan was met with strong headwinds right out of the gate. A surprisingly broad array of lawmakers, from both sides of the political aisle, immediately voiced concerns. Among the concerned parties? The Senate Judiciary Committee, which today held a hearing examining the impact on competition, and potential antitrust concerns, the merger could raise. [More]
The Comcast Merger Isn’t About Lines on a Map; It’s About Controlling the Delivery of Information
By 4.12.14
Comcast and proposed merger partner Time Warner Cable claim they don’t compete because their service areas don’t overlap. They say that a combined company would happily divest itself of a few million customers to keeps its pay-TV market share below 30%, allowing other companies that don’t currently compete with Comcast to keep not competing with Comcast.
This narrow, shortsighted view fails to take into account the full breadth of what’s involved in this merger — broadcast TV, cable TV, network technology, in-home technology, access to the Internet, and much more. In addition to asking whether or not regulators should permit Comcast to add 10-12 million customers, there is a more important question at the core of this deal: Should Comcast be allowed to control both what content you consume and how you get to consume it? [More]
Microsoft Reveals Its 'Me Too' Smartphone
By 10.12.10
Sick of not having a horse in the smart phone race, Microsoft has conjured up its own iDroidBerry, the Windows Phone 7. [More]
